Canary Islands prepares for shield oneself against the meteors. The Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) has joined the dangerous asteroid monitoring network of the Atlas Project, powered by NASA, which also has observatories in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa. This installation, which is expected to be completed throughout 2024, will be the only one in this network that provides data from Europe.
The installation of planetary defense construction has already begun TeideHowever, it will be very different from its predecessors. As Javier Licandro, IAC astrophysicist and one of the main researchers of the project, explains, there will be a total of 16 the telescopes that will be located on the summits of Tenerife. They will be divided into four frames that will each house four of these astronomical viewers. Licandro admits that dividing it will make it difficult to calibrate, but insists that the possibilities that this type of infrastructure opens up “are much greater” than that of its first generation cousins.
“The other Atlas telescopes take a single image, we will take 16 at the same time”, reports the researcher. Despite the added effort, Licandro insists that “it is a cheaper way” to carry out these nocturnal observations and with which “better results” are obtained. With these telescopes, the Canary Islands will contribute to improving the early warning of potentially dangerous asteroids that approach terrestrial space. But it’s not the first time he’s done it.
Teide will house 16 telescopes that will take combined images of asteroids
“With the telescopes that the IAC already has, such as the Great Telescope of the Canary Islands (GTC), we have contributed to the physical characterization and detection of particularly interesting objects”, reports the researcher. With this installation, the scientists were able to detect two objects that they began to monitor. “We came to the conclusion that one was a possible impactor and, therefore, it has been included in the catalog of near-Earth asteroids (NEA)”, explains Licandro. NEA are those objects whose orbital distance from Earth is one twentieth of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun and that they could collide with the Earth in a period of time of 100 years.
Incorporation into this program reinforces the IAC’s commitment to planetary defense. “It is a global effort, and now our observatory will be located in a very prominent place”, highlights the researcher. The IAC has been trying to formalize this collaboration with NASA for four years, which finally became a reality at the end of 2021 after obtaining financing from European recovery funds. This year the first of the four frames of the Atlas project in Tenerife has been installed, and it has already seen its first light.
The Atlas Project aims to establish a early warning for this type of phenomena around the globe. It arose in 2015 as a result of the catastrophe in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, which in 2013 suffered the direct impact of a 17-meter object with a force of more than 500 kilotons (thirty times greater than the Hiroshima bomb). According to the authorities, 1,495 were injured, most of them by the shock wave that caused the explosion by breaking the sound barrier.
“If the planet had had this network, the population could have been alerted that it was approaching and preventive measures taken,” says Licandro. As an example, if the arrival of this meteor had been foreseen, “you would have been warned of the need to stay away from doors and windows or keep them open,” he explains. And it is that the injuries of those affected were caused, for the most part, by the crystals that flew through the air after the shock wave.
Meteorites in the Canary Islands
The fall of meteorites on Earth is more common than it seems, and The example is the recent arrival of a small meteorite, barely one meter, in the sea near the coast of Gran Canaria. In these cases, space rocks are more difficult to detect, mainly because of their small size. “Every week a meteorite of one or two meters falls somewhere on the planet and we have barely been able to detect four in all of history,” explains Licandro. But they also unravel fewer dangers. When these objects pass through the atmosphere, friction breaks them into small pieces. Sometimes, as happened in Lanzarote at dawn on Thursday, it breaks down in two and the population can observe two trails similar to those left by a shooting star. In that case, “it is probable that they have not even reached land,” remarks the researcher, who insists that the pieces could not measure more than a few centimeters.
“Detecting and predicting is essential” even when the objects are small. The planetary defense is completed with two more projects. One is sending a space telescope aimed at the Sun in order to see the objects that appear in that part of the sky. And it is that one of the handicaps of this task has been, precisely, being able to observe the rocks that come from that part of space. “When the asteroids come from the direction of the Sun, we cannot see them from Earth”, highlights the researcher. To do this, both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working on missions to meet this demand. NASA’s is more advanced and it is expected to be launched in 2026. Meanwhile, ESA’s has just received funding to plan the project for the next two years.
On the other hand, there are the missions dedicated to the diversion of potentially dangerous objects. This is the example of the DART mission (acronym for Binary Asteroid Redirection Test), whose objective was to hit the Dimorphos asteroid to change its trajectory. Before the DART impact, Dimorphos took 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its larger host asteroid Didymos. Since the DART collision on September 26, it does so in 32 minutes less: 11 hours and 23 minutes.
